Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Vinyl Discography:

Biography:

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were progressive rock’s first supergroup. Hailed by the rock press and the public as conquering heroes, they succeeded in expanding the audience for progressive rock from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of listeners. They also created a huge radio phenomenon with classic rock songs like “Lucky Man,” “Still…You Turn Me On,” and “Karn Evil 9 1st Impression, Pt. 2,” and hugely influential albums like Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery. Their flamboyance on record and in the studio mirrored the best of the heavy metal bands of the era and proved that classic rockers could compete for arena-sized audiences. In addition to their own commercial success, the trio also paved the way for contemporaries like Jethro Tull and Yes, the latter of which would become their chief rivals for much of the 1970s. ELP disbanded in 1979 but reunited in 1991 and released two more studio albums, Black Moon (1992) and In the Hot Seat (1994), before going on hiatus. They played their final show in 2010 at London’s High Voltage Festival to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Keyboardist Keith Emerson and bassist/guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake died in 2016, leaving drummer Carl Palmer as their sole surviving member.

Keyboardist Keith Emerson planted the seed for the group in late 1969 when his band the Nice shared a bill at the Fillmore West with King Crimson, and the two first discussed the possibility of working together. After the Crimson lineup began to fall apart during their first U.S. tour, Lake chose to leave the group. When they officially teamed up in 1970, Emerson and Lake auditioned several drummers before approaching Carl Palmer, not yet 20 years old and already an overwhelming talent, as well as a former member of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster.

The trio's early rehearsals were based largely on the respective Nice and King Crimson repertoires, including such well-known songs as "Rondo" and "21st Century Schizoid Man." In August 1970, ELP played their first show at the Plymouth Guildhall, just prior to the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970, where they wowed over half a million spectators with their sound and instrumental prowess. A month later, the group completed their debut album, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, consisting of their strongest early originals and two brilliant classical reworkings filled with rippling piano and synthesizer playing from Emerson and lightning-fast drumming from Palmer, anchored around Lake's bass work. The album was an immediate success, reaching the Top 5 in the UK and the Top 20 in America, with significant help from a last-minute addition—under pressure to fill the album's running time, the group opted for a composition Lake had written as a boy, called "Lucky Man." This became their debut single and reached the Top 50 in America.

The trio’s stage act quickly became legendary. Emerson’s organ fireworks—which dated back to his Nice days—led to comparisons with Jimi Hendrix. The recording of ELP’s second album, Tarkus (1971), tested their cohesion as they pushed their sound into new directions and dimensions, with a much more complex electronic keyboard sound and the title track taking up the entire first side. But “Tarkus” as a composition, despite its difficult birth (Lake initially didn’t mesh well with the musical textures or time signatures Emerson and Palmer had begun with), ultimately defined the ELP sound as most people understood it: loud and bombastic, slightly somber in its lyrical tone, and boundlessly exuberant in its instrumental power. The Tarkus album reached Number One in the UK and the Top Ten in America, and it seemed at this point that the trio could do little wrong — after a few failed attempts, they captured a new concert staple, a rock arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, at a March 21, 1971 concert at Newcastle City Hall, and it became a huge hit in its own right. Indeed, as a result of that album's release, millions of high school-age teenagers suddenly had Mussorgsky's name and music – in some way – firmly planted in their consciousness, to the delight or chagrin of music educators (depending on their views) everywhere.

It was eight months before ELP's next album, Trilogy, was released in July 1972. In the meantime, they toured extensively and made it their business to cultivate the college audiences that found their work most natural. Lake never sang better, nor did the group sound more comfortable and relaxed on that album, and among the eight very solid songs in a classic-rock style was one that became something of a signature number, a version of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown." The group also had its most successful pop single from that album with the Lake-penned ballad "From the Beginning."

The group was so credible that when it came time to record a version of the first movement of Alberto Ginastera's “Piano Concerto No. 1” and the publisher refused them permission, they approached the composer himself, who gave his full approval for the track that became “Tocatta” on Brain Salad Surgery, released in 1973.

Brain Salad Surgery, the most popular album in their history, dominated the charts and the airwaves upon its release — it was also their most daring group effort, with the “Karn Evil 9” epic filling more than one side of an LP, as well as some of the best playing and production in their history, and one of the most elaborate packaging of the rather daunting progressive rock boom. By this time, the band had founded their own label, Manticore Records (named after one of the mythological creatures portrayed in “Tarkus”). Through Manticore, ELP also released material from ex-King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield and Italian progressive rock band PFM; Sinfield's presence as a composer with Lake on Brain Salad Surgery also helped to amplify one of the group's weaknesses, the lyrics — where Lake's language always tended toward the pleasing but simplistic, Sinfield, a veteran of King Crimson, brought a lyrical complexity almost as daunting as the group's best music.

In the wake of this string of successes, ELP released a triple live album, Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends, in August 1974, their last new release for more than three years. It was also at this point that the band members began to chafe at the limitations the trio imposed on their individual ambitions—Emerson's most daring compositions were straight-up classical music, requiring orchestral accompaniment; Lake's songs didn't necessarily offer much to either Emerson or Palmer; similarly, Palmer's music went in directions that would have left the others little more than sidemen. A trio of solo albums would have been the solution, but they had also seen how solo releases by members of top acts like Yes and the Moody Blues failed to sell in numbers that would have matched those of their respective groups.

The result was Works, Vol. 1, a double LP that essentially consisted of three one-sided solo albums by each member and a fourth group side. Released in March 1977, the record fared relatively poorly, both commercially and critically. Furthermore, the group was never the same after its release—Works destroyed ELP's unity, and their only remaining motivation to record seemed to be to fulfill their contractual obligations. Worse, they had wasted valuable time during the hiatus between Brain Salad Surgery and Works, during which public tastes were beginning to change—by 1977, the idea of the extended suites, conceptual rock albums, and classic-rock fusion that had characterized ELP's sound seemed hopelessly ponderous and pretentious, as the rise of punk rock and disco combined to undermine any notion of intellectualism in rock. Works, Vol. 2, released in November 1977, was nothing more than a collection of obscure B-sides and oddball tracks dating back four years — though it received more positive reviews in some quarters than its more ambitious predecessor.

Their next album of new material, Love Beach, was later described by the band members themselves as nothing more than a matter of going through the motions. ELP split up in 1979, with Lake pursuing a moderately successful solo career, while Emerson turned to composing film scores and recording occasional solo projects, and Palmer, after a stint with the band Carl Palmer's PM, joined the pop supergroup Asia. In the mid-'80s, Emerson and Lake reunited with drummer Cozy Powell as the short-lived Emerson, Lake & Powell, complete with a self-titled album in 1985 and a tour.

In 1991, Emerson, Lake & Palmer reunited for the album Black Moon, followed by a tour that culminated in the release of Live at the Royal Albert Hall and another studio album, 1994's In the Hot Seat. The trio undertook several international reunion tours in the mid-to-late 1990s, although disagreements over a new album scuppered their planned comeback at the end of the decade. Emerson reformed the Nice for a reunion tour and live album at the turn of the new century, and later collaborated with Mike Bennett on a triple set entitled Reworks: Brain Salad Perjury, which explored new variations on ELP's sound. Palmer later rejoined Asia for a 25th anniversary tour, while Greg Lake toured with Ringo Starr in 2001 before forming his own band. Lake and Emerson planned an acoustic tour of the United States and Canada in 2010, and the trio planned a reunion for a 40th anniversary performance in July 2010, as part of Classic Rock magazine's High Voltage Festival in London's Victoria Park. Sadly, Keith Emerson passed away in March 2016 at the age of 71. As a fitting tribute to the late keyboard great, a number of reissues were released later that year, as well as Anthology, an exclusive three-CD collection of songs spanning the band's career from 1970 to 1998. Nine months after Emerson's death, Greg Lake passed away in December 2016 at the age of 69.Save